The prize for Best Fantasy Film went to Enchanted, which I think is silly in a category that also included Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Stardust, but okay. Then Sweeney Todd took Best Horror Film, which seems to me like a way to avoid giving an award to an actual horror film, like fellow competitors 30 Days of Night, 1408 and The Mist. I guess I can see why Sweeney Todd would be classified as "horror" -- a lot of throats get slit, after all -- but it's a stretch. Then the kicker: Cloverfield wins Best Science-Fiction Film, beating out, among others, Sunshine. The problem is that not only is Cloverfield not a science-fiction film, it's in some ways the opposite of a science-fiction film. Science-fiction entails some sort of larger cosmic context for the fantastic goings-on, which is precisely what Cloverfield refuses to provide. It's a monster movie in its purest form -- horror, not sci-fi.

The full list of winners is here. I'm sure some will flip out at choices like 300 for best action-adventure film -- I'm stunned at how many people hate that movie with a passion -- but that doesn't really bother me. A few awards are neither here nor there -- what's August Rush doing at the Saturn Awards? (Or any awards, for that matter.) Mostly, though, as someone who takes genre cinema seriously, I'm irked at how thoughtless a lot of the picks and designations seem to be. These movies -- and others that didn't make their cut -- deserve better, I think. But I guess the Saturns reward the best genre films of the year in the same way that the Oscars reward the best films of the year.